"Xfce is just as customizable as KDE or GNOME, so I set myself a goal: make Xubuntu look like Windows Vista. Though you won't be told how to achieve the exact same end result, this guide provides comprehensive instructions helping you make Xubuntu look the way you want it to. In any case, I would certainly not recommend such a setup for someone new to Xubuntu. Xubuntu is different than Windows; making it look similar is only confusing."

Resource saving? XFCE? Yes, I remember the time when XFCE, while using GTK1.x was actually resource-saving compared to a full blown gnome desktop. Nowdays it's almost identical to gnome.

Sadly, this is true. I've experienced this fact when trying XFCE based Linux distros on older hardware. Sadly, that's something I've noticed with most Linux distros. They are not aimed at speed anymore, they seem to want to benefit from the new possibilites of modern hardware. Don't get me wrong, that's nothing bad per se, but if you intend to use hardware that's not up to date, you will need to use older software of tailor a system by yourself.

In fact, any GTK2 application, thanks to Cairo, Pango and whatever, is actually slower than any recent QT app. By an order of magnitude.

That's impressing. Allthough I prefer Gnome over KDE (allthough I don't use neither of them regularly), KDE seems to be more responsive in some cases, as you mentioned. But on the other hand, that's just my individual feeling.

The actual buddy I tried to impress with Xubuntu and OpenOffice returned to XP with his old Office 2000. The combination was way faster that I can't blame him. Even trimming down all the eye-candy and blinking features didn't help reaching the same performance.

Maybe geubuntu (using Enlightenment, as far as I remember) could be an alternative. I tried it on a 300 MHz P2 from the live system CD. The impression sentence would be like: "Hey, this is Mac OS X!" :-)

On the other hand, a "self made" FreeBSD with XFCE 3 and OpenOffice 1.1.4 gave a good solution. Together with XMMS and mplayer, even multimedia playback wasn't any problematic. And the XFCE 3 desktop (btw, using "simple old" GTK), was very easy to use, and this was the impression of a very computer illiterate person. I would not dare to try the same with "Windows"...

An earlier XFCE 4, such as the one from the FreeSBIE 1.1 live system CD, could be a solution, too.

And I'm saying this as a GTK and OSS supporter. They should stop saying Xubuntu is a "lighter" desktop. Xubuntu is just an alternative desktop.

Okay, maybe it'sn not because of XFCE itself, it seems to be the problem of the many stuff GTK2 involves which makes the environment heavy (but still alternative). XFCE is a viable desktop alternative to KDE and Gnome, but sadly, I think you gonna pay for this amount of funtions with response speed. :-(